When Colombian megastar Shakira struts around on stage during her current Sale El Sol world tour, she will be doing so against a backdrop of nifty visuals created by New York design studio Loyalkaspar.

“Shakira was a much bigger undertaking then anything we’ve attempted previously,” says Elliott Chaffer, their creative director. “They were looking for original content that had to work over two LED screens and on a huge projector mapping surreal models of an ever-changing animated face, all in just three weeks.”

The title of the tour - and of Shakira’s most recent album – translates as “The Sun Comes Out”, and Chaffer says the nine video sequences they created were themed around the idea of letting your inner sun shine.

“It was a very collaborative process involving every aspect of her show - the lighting designer, the choreographer, the musical director and of course Shakira,” Chaffer says. “For example, in the song She Wolf there were color palettes and cues in the lighting that we followed. The choreography of the dancer on the LED screens also had to match what the dancers were doing on the stage, he adds, requiring Shakira’s body double to perform the She Wolf routine “about ten times”.

For Loyalkaspar, who had previously worked on visuals for the likes of The Who and Jay-Z, the giant animated face was fun even though it presented a special challenge. They used a CAD model which was subsequently fed into a 3D printer for studio testing, to ensure that the proportions were correct.

Ever the perfectionists, Loyalkaspar refined their work many times before they were happy. “We did a lot of onsite testing in Montreal, Atlantic City and at Madison Square Garden, making tweaks to every component of the show up to the last minute.”

Plenty of studio time and onstage testing was needed to get Shakira's stage visuals just right